Abstract
Emissions from traditional cooking practices in low- and middle-income countries have detrimental health and climate effects; cleaner-burning cookstoves may provide “co-benefits”. Here we assess this potential via in-home measurements of fuel-use and emissions and real-time optical properties of pollutants from traditional and alternative cookstoves in rural Malawi. Alternative cookstove models were distributed by existing initiatives and include a low-cost ceramic model, two forced-draft cookstoves (FDCS; Philips HD4012LS and ACE-1), and three institutional cookstoves. Among household cookstoves, emission factors (EF; g (kg wood)−1) were lowest for the Philips, with statistically significant reductions relative to baseline of 45% and 47% for fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and carbon monoxide (CO), respectively. The Philips was the only cookstove tested that showed significant reductions in elemental carbon (EC) emission rate. Estimated health and climate cobenefits of alternative cookstoves were smaller than predicted from laboratory tests due to the effects of real-world conditions including fuel variability and nonideal operation. For example, estimated daily PM intake and field-measurement-based global warming commitment (GWC) for the Philips FDCS were a factor of 8.6 and 2.8 times higher, respectively, than those based on lab measurements. In-field measurements provide an assessment of alternative cookstoves under real-world conditions and as such likely provide more realistic estimates of their potential health and climate benefits than laboratory tests.
Highlights
2.7 billion people depend on the burning of biomass and other solid fuels in three stone fires (TSF) and other traditional cookstoves for their day-to-day cooking purposes.[1]
Black carbon (BC) is coemitted with organic carbon (OC), a component which is often regarded to have a cooling impact on climate,[6] recent studies suggest that the OC fraction that absorbs radiation at short wavelengths contributes significantly to warming.[7−9] The net climate impacts of cooking-related aerosol emissions are uncertain, though likely warming.[10−13] Replacement of traditional cookstoves with alternative technologies has the potential to provide considerable climate and health benefits by reducing emissions and human exposures.[14,15]
Models range from rudimentary low-cost cookstoves often built from local materials to mass produced state-of-the-art forced draft cookstoves (FDCS) which use electrically driven fans for improved combustion efficiency
Summary
2.7 billion people depend on the burning of biomass and other solid fuels in three stone fires (TSF) and other traditional cookstoves for their day-to-day cooking purposes.[1]. Black carbon (BC), commonly known as soot, is an aerosol component formed during combustion that is estimated to have the second highest global warming impact after CO2.4,5 Approximately 25% of global annual BC emissions and 60− 80% of Africa’s and Asia’s BC emissions that are not from open burning (e.g., wildfires) are from domestic solid fuel combustion.[5] BC is coemitted with organic carbon (OC), a component which is often regarded to have a cooling impact on climate,[6] recent studies suggest that the OC fraction (generally called brown carbon or BrC) that absorbs radiation at short wavelengths contributes significantly to warming.[7−9] The net climate impacts of cooking-related aerosol emissions are uncertain, though likely warming.[10−13] Replacement of traditional cookstoves with alternative technologies has the potential to provide considerable climate and health benefits by reducing emissions and human exposures.[14,15] Efforts to reduce these impacts have spurred the development of a range of alternative cookstoves with varying configurations, levels of sophistication, and performance. Using laboratory emission factors (EF; g (kg wood)−1), Grieshop et al.[16] estimated that health (quantified as daily intake of PM2.5 for users) and climate impacts (quantified as global warming commitment or GWC) of various cookstove-fuel combinations can each span 2 orders of magnitude, with all biomass-burning cookstoves having greater impacts than “modern” fuel stoves such as LPG and kerosene
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